Fast and Furious Focus Moves To Chicago Federal Court

Almost a year ago I reported that Jesus Vincente Zambada-Niebla of the Sinaloa cartel was awaiting trial in Chicago. Zambada-Niebla, a second generation cartel thug, was extradited from Mexico for smuggling tons of cocaine into the Windy City, presumably to show his support for Chicago's values. At the time, Zambada-Niebla claimed that he had been granted immunity by the DEA. The agency argues that an “official” immunity deal was never established though they admit he may have acted as an informant. His trial is scheduled to begin in October but the discovery motion filed by his lawyers makes interesting reading. They contend that the true purpose of Fast and Furious was not to track guns but instead to furnish the Sinaloa cartel with the weapons needed to defeat competing cartels.

Mr. Zambada-Niebla in requests #48-51, seeks to obtain information regarding
Operation “Fast & Furious” and the findings regarding that operation in the Joint Staff
Report prepared for Darrell R. Issa, Chairman of the United States House of
Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Senator Charles
E. Grassley, the ranking member of the United States Committee on the Judiciary,
because the materials requested are relevant to his defense of public authority and are
exculpatory.

The Joint Staff Report revealed that the operation known and authorized at the
highest levels of the Justice Department and which included agents from ATF, DEA,
FBI, ICE, and the IRS, allowed guns to be illegally purchased in the United States and
transported to Mexico to end up in the hands of members of drug cartels. This chain of
events inevitably placed the guns in the hands of violent criminals which the Department
of Justice not only was aware of, but sponsored and supported. The Department of
Justice and its agency partners knew that the foreseeable result of this strategy was that
death and destruction would occur in Mexico. Indeed, as confirmed in the report,
violence and death did occur in Mexico and the result was not only approved but
regarded with “giddy optimism by ATF supervisors” (See Congressional Committee
Report on Fast & Furious). Not only was Congress and the public not informed about
what was going on, but more importantly, as is true in this case, the Mexican government
and the intended victims of such actions were not informed, thereby preventing them
from being able to take any precautionary measures. It is estimated that approximately

Case: 1:09-cr-00383 Document #: 94 Filed: 07/29/11 Page 11 of 16 PageID #:379
three thousand people were killed in Mexico as a result of “Operation Fast & Furious,”
including law enforcement officers in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, the headquarters of
the Sinaloa Cartel. The Department of Justice’s leadership apparently saw this as an
ingenious way of combating drug cartel activities.

It has recently been disclosed that in addition to the above-referenced problems
with “Operation Fast & Furious,” the DOJ, DEA, and the FBI knew that some of the
people who were receiving the weapons that were being allowed to be transported to
Mexico, were in fact informants working for those organizations and included some of
the leaders of the cartels. The evidence seems to indicate that the Justice Department not
only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons, but that tax payers’ dollars in the form of
informant payments, may have financed those engaging in such activities. Neither the
ATF or Congress were apparently informed of that situation.

Only July 5, 2011, representative Issa and Senator Grassley sent a letter to United
States Attorney General Eric Holder suggesting that multiple United States agencies were
employing as informants members of Mexican drug organizations who were responsible
for importing into their nation thousands of weapons from the United States, leading to
more than forty thousand homicides in Mexico’s drug war since late 2006. Acting
Director of the ATF Kenneth Melson has also asserted that cartel leaders were paid
informants of the DEA and FBI and were among the individuals who knowingly received
weapons pursuant to “Operation Fast & Furious.” Several of the requests in Mr.
Zambada-Niebla’s request for discovery re public authority defense are focused on
obtaining government information to determine whether leaders and/or members of the
Sinaloa Cartel were among the individuals who received the weapons and to determine

Case: 1:09-cr-00383 Document #: 94 Filed: 07/29/11 Page 12 of 16 PageID #:380
whether their receiving of the weapons was pursuant to the agreement that was originally
entered into between the United States government and Mr. Loya-Castro and the leaders
of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is still in effect.

Director Melson confirms what Mr. Zambada-Niebla is asserting in the matter
before this Court; i.e. that the United States government at its highest levels entered into
agreements with cartel leaders to act as informants against rival cartels and received
benefits in return, including, but not limited to, access to thousands of weapons which
helped them continue their business of smuggling drugs into Chicago and throughout the
United States, and to continue wreaking havoc on the citizens and law enforcement in
Mexico. It is clear that some of the weapons were deliberately allowed by the FBI and
other government representatives to end up in the hands of the Sinaloa Cartel and that
among the people killed by those weapons were law enforcement officers.

You can download or view the full document here. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009, during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations, as long as the intelligence kept coming. The Blaze reports that two Congressmen on Committee for Oversight and Government Reform were unaware of Zambada-Niebla’s arrest and his claim to immunity which isn't exactly a confidence builder in that I have known about it for just a few days short of one year. If the trial judge does order the DOJ the furnish the requested documents he probably won't be interested in hearing about claims of executive privilege. This could be a terrible October surprise for team Obama!